[ballenf]

Agreed. We took the name "e-mail" from regular mail. There has only been one case in history of everyone being told to be careful about opening their mail: the anthrax threat. Still remember a bunch of mail arriving with very brittle paper and burnt edges...

So, the big mistake was to use a real world analog in naming e-mail. We should have called it:

"Russian roulette with packages* anonymously tossed by strangers in your direction".

The analogy is broken and creates cognitive dissonance in users.

* Re: data vs. executable: the analogy could be for letter vs. package. A box is big enough to contain a mechanism for action unlike most letters.

(Apologies to the Russians for that idiom.)